Adventures in VoIP: SPA2002-ER

I’ve been tossing around the idea of setting up an Opdahls-only VoIP network for a while. We live in Tokyo (Although I travel 50+% of the time), my brother and his family are down near Los Angeles, my sister and her family are in the Portland, Oregon area, and my parents split their time between Colorado and the Northwest. A VoIP network would be an elegant solution to keeping us all in touch, and by assigning each of us a virtual extension number on the system, a free phone call takes nothing more than picking up the line and dialing the extention of whatever location you want to reach. Conference calls at Christmas or other holidays are a no brainer, and in the future I may actually start trunking some channels in for calls out to actual phone lines.

So…what to do. As I said, I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have already played around with a PBX-in-a-Flash system a couple of times. It works great and I am currently nosing around for a system on which to host a full Linux installation (I’ve VMWare’d it until now.). I was at Fry’s in Tempe today looking at the Intel ICH7-M as a system base and decided to go look at what they had for ATAs (Analog Telephone Adapters). They had the usual Vonage PAP2 systems there (Both old and v2), but what caught my eye and my pocketbook was a shelf full of Earthlink-branded SPA2002 systems (So the SPA2002-ER) at $29.95 each. I now have two, and after tonight’s successful testing in my hotel room I will go and buy several more tomorrow.

The SPA2002-ER is locked into Earthlink, so in order to use them in my OpTel plan my next step was to unlock them. A quick search around the internet showed that the unlock was pretty straightforward, but I didn’t find a step-by-step guide. Here’s a write-up of how I “upgraded” my unit.

First, disconnect your network from the internet to prevent the SPA2002 from contacting the mothership. I don’t know what will happen if they do connect, but some links seem to indicate that once they’ve done that, you’re doomed — Perhaps they update the password when they connect and make it so that you cannot get in as admin any longer. In any case, unplug your cable or DSL modem from your router. If your modem is your router, unplug it from whatever is bringing it the internet signal. You need to keep the router portion running so that you can assign an IP address to your SPA2002 and your PC, so a hub alone will not do it unless you are handy with Linux and setting up a DHCP server yourself. If I’ve just lost you and you can’t figure out how to keep your router alive while not connected to the internet, this project isn’t for you. Go spend the extra $20 and buy an unlocked one.

Once you are sandboxed, plug your SPA2002 in to your router and then into power. Once it has booted up, plug in a phone and dial ****. Once the voice starts speaking in the phone, dial 110# and then note down the IP address that gets read back to you. It will probably be something like 192.168.1.2. Now make sure that your PC is also connected to the router (Could be wired or wireless. I was wireless.), open a browser, and in the address bar at the top type in the address you were given. For me it was 192.168.2.2. This will open up the main configuration page. Click the ADMIN LOGIN link in the upper right and enter the following as your username and password:

user: admin
pass: 0rLhnT34vBg2SqwbSoDyGslvF (Thanks to the unknown source of this password! That one didn’t come easily unless you worked at Earthlink…)

After that, click into the ADVANCED link in the upper right of your screen. Now we are going to scrub out all references to Earthlink to prevent the SPA2002 from knowing it was ever anything but an unlocked box. If you don’t see some of these entries on your screen it is because you didn’t click the ADVANCED link and get into the detailed configuration screens.

In the System tab…
1.) Kill everything under System Configuration in the “Restricted Access Domains” field.
2.) Kill everything under the Optional Network Configuration (Hey — It’s optional, so my theory is that unless they prove I need it, I don’t.)
Now click Submit All Changes. When you get your screen back, go back to the Systems tab and check your results to make sure you are clean. Note that you can also change the Admin Password in this tab as well. If you do, you will need to log on as Admin again with your new password after you Submit All Changes. I highly recommend changing the password as it will prevent your SPA2002 from being accessed and changed if for some reason it does talk with Earthlink servers.

In the Provisioning tab…
1.) Kill the profile rule in the Configuration Profile Section.
Submit All Changes.

Congratulations on your new unlocked SPA2002 box… :-)

Now that your SPA2002 is clean, it’s time to update the firmware to get rid of any possible remaining Earthlink nonsense as well as get you current on what features are available. At the Linksys website they have firmware version 3.1.2. At the Sipura website they have version 3.1.5. I went with the Sipura v3.1.5 and it seems to work just fine. This version seems to add some features and fix some bugs that are still in the Linksys v3.1.2, so unless I have problems, I’ll stay here. I’ll post if I change for whatever reason. For reference, out of the four units I have unlocked so far, 3 were already v3.1.5 and one was v3.1.8. Despite there being no change in the version number, I decided to re-flash the firmware on all the v3.1.5 units with the Sipura firmware as a precaution.

To upgrade the firmware, download whatever firmware you decide to use and unpack it. As far as the upgrade itself, run the .exe file, follow the instructions, and you will be fine. One note is that if you have Windows Firewall running, it will attempt to block the firmware install routines. Even if you allow the program through the firewall the first firmware upgrade attempt will fail. I simply ran it again and it worked the second time. If it doesn’t work, go back and check that upgrades are allowed under the Provisioning tab. They should be allowed by default, but you never know. Once you’ve upgraded, you can re-enter the configuration screen through your browser again and in the first page you can check the version field to see whether the upgrade was successful.

A last few notes. The above process worked for me for 4 units and should work for you. That said, unit #3 (v3.1.5 firmware) choked during the firmware upgrade and refused to do anything until it had sat without power for a while. Even then it wouldn’t connect with my router so that I could access it through my browser. It did, however, respond to the telephone prompts, so I reset the unit to factory defaults (****. then 73738#, then 1 to confirm) and was able to recover it. When it had reset to factory defaults, all of the Earthlink settings were recovered as well, so I had to go back and clean them out a second time.

That’s it! Now it’s a matter of actually putting together the VoIP network, but I’m going to play the fool at first and follow the smart guys over at www.nerdvittles.com. I was waiting for the Asterisk 1.4 version to get established, and they did a good job of it. Now all I have to do is get off of my duff and implement it… :-)